“Eileen Campbell-Reed has taken a fascinating denominational schism and rendered it in a new and plausible way. She has accomplished something most of us who have worked on Southern Baptists are ill-equipped to do, and therefore makes a unique and important contribution to the study of Southern Baptists in particular and religion in America more broadly. This is a well-argued work of scholarship based on solid evidence.” —Barry Hankins, author of Baptists in America: A History
From 1979 to 2000, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) was mired in conflict, with the biblicist and autonomist parties fighting openly for control. This highly polarizing struggle ended in a schism that created major changes within the SBC and also resulted in the formation of several new Baptist groups. Discussions of the schism, academic and otherwise, generally ignore the church’s clergywomen for the roles they played and the contributions they made to the fracturing of the largest Protestant group in the United States. Ordained women are typically treated as a contentious issue between the parties. Only recently are scholars beginning to take seriously these women’s contributions and interpretations as active participants in the struggle.
Anatomy of a Schism is the first book on the Southern Baptist split to place ordained women’s narratives at the center of interpretation. Author Eileen Campbell-Reed brings her unique perspective as a pastoral theologian in conducting qualitative interviews with five Baptist clergywomen and allowing their narratives to focus attention on both psychological and theological issues of the split. The stories she uncovers offer a compelling new structure for understanding the path of Southern Baptists at the close of the twentieth century. The narratives of Anna, Martha, Joanna, Rebecca, and Chloe reframe the story of Southern Baptists and reinterpret the rupture and realignment in broad and significant ways. Together they offer an understanding of the schism from three interdisciplinary perspectives—gendered, psychological, and theological—not previously available together. In conversation with other historical events and documents, the women’s narratives collaborate to provide specific perspectives with universal implications for understanding changes in Baptist life over the last four decades.
The schism’s outcomes held profound consequences for Baptist individuals and communities. Anatomy of Schism is an illuminating ethnographic and qualitative study sure to be indispensable to scholars of theology, history, and women’s studies alike.
EILEEN R. CAMPBELL-REED is associate professor of practical theology at Central Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee, and codirector of the Learning Pastoral Imagination Project, a longitudinal study of ministry. She is the author of Being Baptist: A Resource for Individual and Group Study and numerous articles about women in ministry.
Since 1979 Southern Baptists have been noisily struggling to agree on symbols, beliefs, and practices as they attempt to make sense of their changing social world. Nancy Ammerman has carefully documented their struggle. She tells the story of the Baptist reversal from a moderate to a fundamentalist outlook and speculates on the future of the denomination.
Ammerman places change among the Southern Baptists in the context of the cultural and economic changes that have transformed the South from its rural past into an urbanizing, culturally diverse region. Not only did the South change; Southern Baptists did as well. Reflecting this diversity, the Southern Baptist bureaucracy was relatively progressive. During the 1960s and 1970s, moderate sentiments prevailed, while fundamentalists remained on the margins. These two were, however, becoming increasingly divergent in what they considered important about being a Baptist, in their views about the Bible, in their attitudes on the origination of women, on Christian morals, and on national politics.
Late in the 1970s, a fundamentalist coalition emerged, followed by unsuccessful efforts by moderates to oppose it. The battles escalated until 1985, when 45,000 Baptists gathered in Dallas to decide between contending presidential candidates. That dramatic event illustrated the extent to which organized political resources were determining the course of the conflict. Ammerman studies these strategies and resources as well.
Examining how this tension affected Baptists, Ammerman begins with case studies of the change it is producing in Baptist agencies. But she also brings us back to the local churches and individual believers who are renegotiating their relationships within their denomination. She asks whether the denomination’s polity can accommodate an increasingly diverse group of Baptists, of whether the only way dissidents can have a voice is through schism.
Scholars and journalists have paid significant attention to the contemporary Fundamentalist tendencies of southern Protestantism. However, many studies neglect to consider how the Fundamentalist controversies that roiled the Baptists and Presbyterians of the North during the 1920s affected the Southern Baptist Convention schism of 1970–2000.
Fundamentalism, Fundraising, and the Transformation of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1919–1925 explores the scope and character of the interaction between Southern Baptists and early Fundamentalism during the late 1910s and early 1920s. By focusing more closely on the Southern Baptist Convention, Andrew Christopher Smith examines the interaction between the northern Fundamentalist movement and southern religion during the era. Though scholars agree that Fundamentalism is not native to the South, no book thus far has considered the effects of the Fundamentalist movement and how it influenced southern Protestant denominational organizations, independent of southern rejection of Fundamentalist-sponsored interdenominational evangelistic and educational institutions. Smith proposes that Fundamentalist ideas, lingering in the atmosphere of the South after wafting there through hearsay, national religious periodicals, and the secular press,likely influenced Southern Baptist self-understanding during this critical period.
Examining documentary evidence, Smith explains that following the First World War, Southern Baptists pushed toward bureaucratization. The “Seventy-Five Million Campaign,” a fundraising and organization-building drive that the convention approved in 1919, was the denominational movement through which the selective appropriation of Fundamentalist ideas occurred. Exploring the interplay of Southern Baptist claims and northern Fundamentalist precepts, Smith fills a void in scholarly examination of early-twentieth-century Baptist history.
ANDREW C. SMITH is assistant professor of religion at Carson-Newman University. His articles have appeared in Perspectives in Religious Studies, Baptist History and Heritage, and Tennessee Baptist History.
Loathed by mainstream Southern Baptists, J. Frank Norris (1877–1952) was in many ways the Southern Baptist Convention’s first fundamentalist. Twenty-five years after its first publication, this second edition of Barry Hankins’s field-defining work God’s Rascal: J. Frank Norris and the Beginnings of Southern Fundamentalism engages new scholar- ship on American fundamentalism to reassess one of the most controversial figures in the history of American Christianity. In this completely revised edition, Hankins pens an entirely new chapter on J. Frank Norris’s murder trial, examines newly uncovered details regarding his recurrent sexual improprieties, and reconsiders his views on race in order to place J. Frank Norris, a man both despicable and captivating, among the most significant Southern fundamentalists of the twentieth century.
Norris merged a southern populist tradition with militant fundamentalism, carving out a distinctly take-no-prisoners political niche within the Baptist church that often offended his allies as much as his enemies. Indeed, Norris was about as bad as a fundamentalist could be. He resided in a world of swirling conspiracies of leftists who, he argued, intended to subvert both evangelical religion and American culture. There are times when Norris’s ego looms so large in his story that he seemed less interested in the threat these alleged conspiracies posed than in their power to keep him in the limelight. Finally, his tactics foreshadowed those employed in the fundamentalists’ tenacious takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention that would occur more than twenty years after Norris’s death.
The question of how one can be both Hispanic and Protestant has perplexed Mexican Americans in Texas ever since Anglo-American Protestants began converting their Mexican Catholic neighbors early in the nineteenth century. Mexican-American Protestants have faced the double challenge of being a religious minority within the larger Mexican-American community and a cultural minority within their Protestant denominations. As they have negotiated and sought to reconcile these two worlds over nearly two centuries, los Protestantes have melded Anglo-American Protestantism with Mexican-American culture to create a truly indigenous, authentic, and empowering faith tradition in the Mexican-American community.
This book presents the first comparative history of Hispanic Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists in Texas. Covering a broad sweep from the 1830s to the 1990s, Paul Barton examines how Mexican-American Protestant identities have formed and evolved as los Protestantes interacted with their two very different communities in the barrio and in the Protestant church. He looks at historical trends and events that affected Mexican-American Protestant identity at different periods and discusses why and how shifts in los Protestantes' sense of identity occurred. His research highlights the fact that while Protestantism has traditionally served to assimilate Mexican Americans into the dominant U.S. society, it has also been transformed into a vehicle for expressing and transmitting Hispanic culture and heritage by its Mexican-American adherents.
The Sacred Harp choral singing tradition originated in the American South in the mid-nineteenth century, spread widely across the country, and continues to thrive today. Sacred Harp isn’t performed but participated in, ideally in large gatherings where, as the a cappella singers face each other around a hollow square, the massed voices take on a moving and almost physical power. I Belong to This Band, Hallelujah! is a vivid portrait of several Sacred Harp groups and an insightful exploration of how they manage to maintain a sense of community despite their members’ often profound differences.
Laura Clawson’s research took her to Alabama and Georgia, to Chicago and Minneapolis, and to Hollywood for a Sacred Harp performance at the Academy Awards, a potent symbol of the conflicting forces at play in the twenty-first-century incarnation of this old genre. Clawson finds that in order for Sacred Harp singers to maintain the bond forged by their love of music, they must grapple with a host of difficult issues, including how to maintain the authenticity of their tradition and how to carefully negotiate the tensions created by their disparate cultural, religious, and political beliefs.
In Mainstreaming Fundamentalism: John R. Rice and Fundamentalism’s Public Reemergence, Keith Bates embarks on a thematic and chronological exploration of twentieth-century Baptist fundamentalism in postwar America, sharing the story of a man whose career intersected with many other leading fundamentalists of the twentieth century, such as J. Frank Norris, Bob Jones Sr., Bob Jones Jr., and Jerry Falwell.
Unique among histories of American fundamentalism, this book explores the theme of Southern fundamentalism’s reemergence through a biographical lens. John R. Rice’s mission to inspire a broad cultural activism within fundamentalism—particularly by opposing those who fostered an isolationist climate—would give direction and impetus to the movement for the rest of the twentieth century. To support this claim, Bates presents chapters on Rice’s background and education, personal and ecclesiastical separatism, and fundamentalism and political action, tracing his rise to leadership during a critical phase of fundamentalism’s development until his death in 1980.
Bates draws heavily upon primary source texts that include writings from Rice’s fundamentalist contemporaries, his own The Sword of the Lord articles, and his private papers—particularly correspondence with many nationally known preachers, local pastors, and laypeople over more than fifty years of Rice’s ministry. The incorporation of these writings, combined with Bates’s own conversations with Rice’s family, facilitate a deeply detailed, engaging examination that fills a significant gap in fundamentalist history studies.
Mainstreaming Fundamentalism: John R. Rice and Fundamentalism’s Public Reemergence provides a nuanced and insightful study that will serve as a helpful resource to scholars and students of postwar American fundamentalism, Southern fundamentalism, and Rice’s contemporaries.
As the story goes, an itinerant preacher once visited the Bluegrass region and proclaimed heaven to be “a mere Kentucky of a place.” The Commonwealth’s first Baptists certainly thought so as they began settling the region a decade before statehood. By 1785 a group of pioneering preachers formed the Elkhorn Association, widely regarded as the oldest Baptist association west of the Alleghenies. Often portrayed in the historiography as the vanguard of a new frontier democracy, the Elkhorn Association, on closer inspection, reveals itself to be far more complex. In A Mere Kentucky of a Place, Keith Harper argues that the association’s Baptist ministers were neither full-fledged frontier egalitarians nor radical religionists but simply a people in transition. These ministers formed their identities in the crucible of the early national period, challenged by competing impulses, including their religious convictions, Jeffersonian Republicanism, and a rigid honor code—with mixed results.
With a keen eye for human interest, Harper brings familiar historical figures such as John Gano and Elijah Craig to life as he analyzes leadership in the Elkhorn Association during the early republic. Mining the wealth of documents left by the association, Harper details the self-aware struggle of these leaders to achieve economic wealth, status, and full social and cultural acceptance, demonstrating that the Elkhorn Association holds a unique place in the story of Baptists in the “New Eden” of Kentucky.
Ideal for course adoption in religious studies and students of Kentucky history, this readable work is sure to become a standard source on the history of religion on the Kentucky frontier.
Examines the conflict between modern-day Southern Baptists and “liberal” Southern Baptists over control of the Southern Baptist Convention
David Morgan captures the essence of the conflict between some modern-day Southern Baptists, who saw themselves as crusaders for truth, as they sought to redeem a new holy land--the Southern Baptist Convention-- from the control of other Southern Baptists they viewed as "liberals." To the so-called liberals, the crusaders were "fundamentalists" on a mission, not to reclaim the SBC in the name of theological truth but to gain control and redirect its activities according to their narrow political, social, and theological perspectives. The New Crusades provides a comprehensive history of the conflict, taking the reader through the bitter and divisive struggles of the late 1980s, that culminated in the 1991 emergence of a moderate faction within the SBC. The fundamentalists had won.
This story, set in the Piney Woods country of East Texas, spans most of a century, from shortly after the close of the Civil War to the 1960's. It is the story of Charley White, who was born in the middle of those woods—in a decaying windowless log cabin a few years after his mother and father were freed from slavery. His childhood, lived in almost unbelievable poverty, was followed by financial stability achieved in middle age through years of struggle. And then, in order to obey God's will, he abandoned this secure life, and for forty years he waged a one-man war on poverty and intolerance.
Winner of the Carr P. Collins Award (best nonfiction book) of the Texas Institute of Letters, No Quittin' Sense presents the story of Rev. C. C. "Charley" White, whose life has inspired thousands of readers since the book was first published in 1969.
In 1812 at the age of nineteen, Sally Merriam Wait experienced her conversion. For those raised in an evangelical church during the religious fervor of the Second Great Awakening, conversion represented a key moment in a young person’s life, marking the transition from childhood and frivolity to the duties of a pious life. Sally’s conversion also marked the beginning of her journal.
Wait grew up in a New England swept with revival. Her letters reveal a northernborn woman with anti-slavery leanings engaging with an unfamiliar environment in the slave-holding South; she comes to embrace the principles of a market economy in Jacksonian America, while attending to her developing religious faith. Her decisions are shaped by a surging evangelical movement, changes in the American economy, the rise of women’s social agency, a fracturing of political traditions, and the moral conflicts inherent in a slave economy. At its simplest, Sally’s life is the tale of a nineteenth-century woman endeavoring to make her mark on the world while striving to develop her faith.
Pious Ambitions establishes Sally Merriam Wait as a significant figure in North Carolina and Baptist history. Her ambition led her from young convert to devoted wife of Reverend Samuel Wait, the first president and founder of Wake Forest University. Her journal was passed down carefully from generation to generation until it found its way in 1993 to the Special Collections and Archives at Z. Smith Reynolds Library at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, along with a large cache of letters and other documents. In examining this trove and reconstructing the life of Wait, Mary Tribble provides a rare glimpse into the spiritual education of a young woman who nevertheless successfully navigated the rise of capitalism in the market economy of the early nineteenth century.
In The Power of Mammon, Curtis D. Johnson describes how the market economy and market-related forces, such as the media, politics, individualism, and consumerism, radically changed the nature of Baptist congregational life in New York State during three centuries. Collectively, these forces emphasized the importance of material wealth over everything else, and these values penetrated the thinking of Baptist ministers and laypeople alike. Beginning in the 1820s, the pastorate turned into a profession, the laity’s influence diminished, closeknit religious fellowships evolved into voluntary associations, and evangelism became far less effective. Men, being the most engaged in the market, secularized the more quickly and became less involved in church affairs. By the 1870s, male disengagement opened the door to increased female participation in church governance. While scientific advances and religious pluralism also played a role, the market and its related distractions were the primary forces behind the secularization of Baptist life.
The Power of Mammon is history from the ground up. Unlike many denominational histories, this book emphasizes congregational life and the importance of the laity. This focus allows the reader to hear the voices of ordinary Baptists who argued over a host of issues. Johnson deftly connects large social trends with exhaustive attention to archival material, including numerous well-chosen records preserved by forty-two New York churches. These records include details related to membership, discipline, finance, and institutional history. Utilizing statistical analysis to achieve even greater clarity, Johnson effectively bridges the gap between the particularity of church records and the broader history of New York’s Baptist churches.
Johnson’s narrative of Baptist history in New York will serve as a model for other regional studies and adds to our understanding of secularization and its impact on American religion.
This book is the first anthology of the autobiographical writings of Peter Randolph, a prominent nineteenth-century former slave who became a black abolitionist, pastor, and community leader.
Randolph’s story is unique because he was freed and relocated from Virginia to Boston, along with his entire plantation cohort. A lawsuit launched by Randolph against his former master’s estate left legal documents that corroborate his autobiographies.
Randolph's writings give us a window into a different experience of slavery and freedom than other narratives currently available and will be of interest to students and scholars of African American literature, history, and religious studies, as well as those with an interest in Virginia history and mid-Atlantic slavery.
For more than half a century, Virginia E. Walker Broughton (1856–1934) worked tirelessly to uplift black communities, and especially black women, throughout Tennessee. Born into an elite African American family in Nashville, she began her professional career as a teacher and later became one of the most prominent domestic missionaries in the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., as well as an accomplished speaker and writer. This annotated collection is the first scholarly work devoted entirely to Broughton’s life and writings.
The book for which Broughton is best known, Twenty Year’s [sic] Experience of a Missionary, was an autobiography first published in 1907 and reprinted in 1988 as part of a scholarly edition of spiritual narratives by black women. Recently, in the archives of Fisk University, Broughton’s alma mater, Tomeiko Ashford Carter discovered an earlier autobiographical work, A Brief Sketch of the Life and Labors of Mrs. V. W. Broughton, Bible Band Missionary, for Middle and West Tennessee, which was distributed at the famous Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition of 1895. While both autobiographies portray Broughton as an important religious figure for whom missionary work became a saving grace, Life and Labors is more revealing of key facts about Broughton and her family, and it situates them more clearly among the nation’s black elite. This volume not only brings Life and Labors back into print but also collects various other pieces Broughton produced during her long career.
Among those other writings is a 1904 booklet titled Woman’s Work: As Gleaned from the Women of the Bible, and the Bible Women of Modern Times, which recognizes the prominence of the female in Christian theology and shows how Broughton anticipated the work of present-day feminist and womanist theologians. Several “training course” articles that Broughton wrote for a National Baptist newspaper, covering such topics as the Christian deportment of women and the need for black spiritual literature, are also gathered here, as are a program she devised for systematic Bible study and a brief article, published just a few years before her death, in which she describes some of her missionary field work. Complementing these primary materials are an extensive critical introduction and notes by Carter, a Walker-Broughton family tree, and a chronology of Broughton’s life.
As this collection makes clear, Virginia Broughton was strongly committed to making the work of black religious women an ongoing intellectual enterprise. In these pages, she emerges as both a dedicated missionary and a formidable religious scholar.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press